Digital networks are becoming increasingly popular in offering multimedia resources to consumers. However, enforcement of ownership rights in the multimedia content is of primary concern as the digital media is distributed for profit. Methods of watermarking and data hiding are known in the prior art to offer solutions to the problem of illegal distribution of the digital media. The goal in these applications is to ensure that the hidden data can only retrieved by a person if he or she is authorized to do so. Data hiding is generally applied when large amounts of data are to be hidden as opposed to digital watermarking where a small amount of specific identification information is provided.
Thus, digital video processing methods to date have focused on identifying multimedia using watermarking and digital signatures. However, digital signatures may not be validated without special software or key that is provided only to a single authorized person, or limited group of authorized persons. In certain circumstances, watermarking by itself, as oppose to encryption, may not be secret as the primary objective of watermarking is to survive tampering. Of course, watermark can also be encrypted.